Killing Creative Thinking

Many people argue that technology limits our ability to think creatively but research shows that technology to an extent, actually fosters creative thinking. It is important to recognize creative thinking as an essential for the 21st century because we are incorporating technology more and more in our lives every day. So we are asked, is technology limiting our creative thinking ability? No, technology is, in fact, a tool for creative thinking. There are millions of things that have changed since we first started developing technology as intensely as we have in this past century and with deeper developing technologies we have innovated new ways what being creative means. Since then we have created the car, the T.V., radio, computer, and thousands of more innovations that assist our creative minds in ways that our ancestors only dreamt of experiencing.

Technology helps us to discover creativity in the best way possible by providing numerous answers to your problem. You can research methods of thinking like mind mapping and virtually have no limit to what you can create from nothing. “ Pictures and structured diagrams are thought to be more comprehensible than just words, and a clearer way to illustrate an understanding of complex topics. Variants of these tools are available under different names: “concept mapping”, “mind mapping” and “argument mapping”(Martin 2010). Sometimes these terms are used synonymously. Technology can be seen all around you in the 21st century, we are constantly evolving into using more and more technology to assist us.

Technology has been used to create and innovate so many things in our life that enable us to think more creatively than ever before. The old school version of creative thinking can easily refer to the four main types of creativity. This Box Plot model can help you see how creativity is brought out of you. With balance through these things, you can better understand where our creativity is inspired from. Before the virtual world, humans thought creatively solely from their minds from collaborating and collecting data from all forms of life. Through hard times and good times… inspiration to create comes from the things you surround yourself by absorbing consciously and unconsciously.

By Violet Biang

Bringing out the creativity within yourself comes by doing these things. Training your brain to think and be more creative has to do more so with yourself than technology. Creativity starts with taking two or more concepts or ideas and shaping them together into something new and useful. We must relearn to think more creativity many different times in our lifetime because from the time we start learning different literacies we retain the rules we set on certain things we have been taught. The phrase “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks” comes from people who have long been used to doing things in a particular way for a long time and will not abandon their habits.

Technology fosters creativity through many ways social networking and connecting through our virtual worlds. Much like the British as a nation reaching an age of enlightenment when they stopped drinking so much alcohol and switched to tea and coffee: The millennials are making major breakthroughs every day because of technology. Raymond Papp, from the University of Tampa, explains this developing connection, “As online communication and collaboration becomes more commonplace, universities are exploring the educational possibilities of online virtual environments for reaching the Millennials. Both virtual worlds and social networking constitute a large part of the Millennials’ time and incorporating these technologies into the classroom can foster a more collaborative and diverse learning atmosphere.” (Papp 2018)

We must recognize that there is another side to this predicament: that is that some people say technology does limit our creativity. Multiple researchers have written about how technology blocks our creative thinking because we become too reliant on these tools. But through regulation of these tools, we can be more successful in our ventures.

On an article about using technology in creating we are given a perfect example of what implementing technology in the right way looks like.”Research shows that when we’re faced with too many options or look at something in terms of unlimited possibilities, we tend to become overwhelmed and actually end up thinking less creatively. So to avoid this, we sometimes need to limit our choices by putting a few restrictions in place.” (Stenger 2017).

An idea is not one single thing, creating a new idea takes a new cluster of neurons that create a network that has never been formed before. We take in ideas all around us all the time, constantly shaping our minds stitching them together into something new. Creating environments like this is not always easy in our day to day lives but with using our virtual world and the world around us we can create a future we had hoped for.